From: "Julie Devall" <krena_li_mara AT hotmail.com>
To: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
Subject: [b-hebrew] Prophetic Perfect?
Date: Tue, 18 May 2004 14:42:31 +0000
Gentlemen,
Perhaps we should look at Jouon-Muraoka on this point:
"In prophecies a future event is sometimes regarded as having already been
accomplished, hence the use of qatal. This prophetic perfect is not a
grammatical perfect, but a rhetorical device." (The examples cited are Isa.
9.1, 9.5.)
If we step back and consider these so-called prophetic perfects within the
frame which the author/redactor constructs, we find these passages embedded
within a larger discourse. What JM calls a rhetorical device is perhaps
just a function of pragmatics. My instructor (if I correctly understood the
lecture) asked our class to consider the mode of prophecy itself. (Assuming
continuity of Isa.) Prophecy here comes in the mode of a Vision. So,
perhaps the use fo the qatal is a function of the vision which was past, Isa
1.